Author's Note: Well, I banked two months in between chapters and shot for five. My bad.

Also my apologies. Admittedly, other projects have been directing my attention away from this fic. For anyone who checks Hannah's non-Lectery fiction board, you know what I'm talking about (and consequentially from where I pulled the supplementary characters added in the previous chapter). It wasn't intentional; it just happened. I've had a blast here - made friends I hope to keep in contact with and will avidly continue to read and reply to assorted stories. However, granted how long it has taken me to finish this, it will likely be my last contribution to the fandom. And I promise to finish it - I don't care how long it takes.

Such was not an easy decision to come to. I wrestled with it for a few months while struggling to find my voice in this story once more.

This chapter is dedicated to Helene, to whom I wish a speedy recovery.

Previously in Stella-Attraversato: Clarice Starling, snowed-in with Hannibal Lecter after conducting a prison transfer to Florence, Colorado, makes a desperate, arbitrary phone-call for assistance. Contact established, she must decide what to do with Dr. Lecter when/if the aforementioned help arrives.



Chapter Ten




To say her nerves were calmed by the reassurance of impending help was a lie, but the thought did provide some strain of warmth. The knowledge that, as she had discovered in her journeys throughout Florence, people could surprise you with sudden bursts of generosity. Of compassionate human understanding.

It was only a matter of time. Of placing as much space between herself and the doctor as humanly possible. Of rearranging her thoughts while trying to decide what the best course of action would be concerning her temporary host, when and if help did arrive.

There was more to it than that. It was a matter of time, calculation, and hope.

She couldn't leave him and she couldn't well take him alone. That was just asking for trouble. With her belongings discarded in an island of snow, she rather doubted he would be good enough to provide her with the necessary restraints. No. It was one or the other. No medium to consider. Nothing as a basic alternative.

Where did that leave her?

"I trust your phone call was productive," Dr. Lecter greeted as she joined him in the kitchen. Starling arched a brow at his discernment, determined that anyone could have translated the relief flooding her features. "Daresay, I don't believe I have ever seen you quite this…at ease."

"Forgive me when I say relaxing those around you is not among your higher qualities," she replied, sitting at the chair opposite of him.

At that, his eyes flickered with interest. "But you, my dear, appear to be most content. I must be doing something right."

There was something she didn't want to concede. A long breath rolled off Starling's chest as she pulled a chair out of the kitchen table arrangement, floating to a seat. "Well," she drawled once a coherent response was pieced together. "I'll admit, the accommodations could be worse than what was provided. That and you haven't yet done something to make me wish my gun was in reach."

A sliver of irritation flashed behind his eyes: enough to make her catch herself but not enough to provoke fear. His word was sufficient for that. For the knowledge of her continued safety. The acceptance that he would allow her to leave when the opportunity arose. If her salvation could brave the icy roads without managing to drive into a ditch and require their own rescue. Without managing to blow her call off for lack of caring for someone so blissfully unconnected to them.

A way to get out of this bizarre situation before the chance was granted to let things become even stranger.

Dr. Lecter would allow that because he was a gentleman. First and foremost. She had once spent an inactive stakeout debating whether he was more offended at the slanderous cannibal insults hurled from every which direction or the insinuation that he was not well versed in the manner of proper etiquette. Both answers led her down further paths of questioning, but she had not allowed herself to explore. If she opened her mind to that side of logic, it risked corruption of minor proportion. Minor, but any sort of suggested lenience to what Crawford jokingly called The Dark Side frightened her beyond belief.

Whether or not he ever admitted it aloud—or to himself, for that matter—Starling had the vague conception that one of her employer's concerns enveloped the possibility of such seduction. It had happened once before on a degree of minimalism with the one before her. Special Agent Graham: a man both praised and frowned upon in matters of the Bureau. To say he was seduced by what was before him struck her as grossly unfair. It was the consensus of many when they met for coffee but she doubted anyone actually believed it. She doubted even the prestigious and still-missing Dr. Chilton could have undergone such scrutiny—not to mention unscheduled facial surgery—without having the mother of all breakdowns.

And now here she was. Their situations were not similar; she doubted Graham could successfully hold his wits about him were he trapped with Dr. Lecter. Odd how two distantly related people could have such a variety of experience where the same man was concerned. The same mad murderer of god-knows-how-many who was currently chopping at peppers for the omelet he was preparing with what looked to be a not-so-dull kitchen knife.

Little details like that were slipping at an alarming rate. Details that she should not forgo, despite whatever situation she found herself in. A very capable killer was only feet away, wielding an object that was—true—neither aimed for her or likely to be, but such failed to dismiss the weight of responsibility irrefutably placed on her shoulders.

When he spoke again, she was not sure. He might have been speaking throughout the duration of her reverie—drawn and ignored because his voice was constantly housed in her head, whether or not he was in the same room. Starling avoided jumping at her latest inward revelation; instead focused intently on the words pouring from the madman's mouth.

"I've often wondered since our last parting if you ever found a cap for your extreme odds of mistrust," he was saying. "Have I not made it perfectly clear that no harm will come to you while you're under this roof? Really, Clarice. You do know how I abhor repeating myself."

The crafty construction of a reply. The willful fall into the face of old habits. It was familiar in a way she detested. Shivers of remembrance traced her spine in cold consternation.

And yet that one voice persisted that with the variety of ways to push his buttons, the thing that would anger him the most was undoubtedly anything that suggested slinking back from her sense of self. The promise that the world was interesting with her in it reserved more than ample reassurance. That, and there was that annoying tendency to believe what the doctor said. What he promised. Despite numerous indiscretions, she had never caught him in the middle of a lie that was not planned or provoked. That was there for the sheer malice of personal benefit in manner of a free meal rather than the more pushing issues of imminent freedom.

"I thought you liked me on my toes, Doctor."

There were a number of ways that could be answered; luckily, he did not pursue any of them.

Things grew awkwardly quiet.

"How long do you suspect it will take for your saviors to pinpoint your location?" was the next question. "I'll confess, while your persistence is most endearing, the extremes you are willing to take are rather telling. Don't you think it a tad unlikely that a band of traveling stranglers will be able to pinpoint your exact location in the midst of this mess?"

The voicing of all her fears. Starling knew it was a gamble. She knew it was impossible. She knew that she had—in all likelihood—just asked the first willingly naïve civilian to waste precious time trying to isolate her precise position. To arbitrarily search the already-dangerous roads for the first sign of a turned over truck and hope that she wasn't the only vacationer that got detoured once the snow started falling.

Furthermore, the matter required a certain measure of trust on the shoulders of people she didn't know. Therein lied the problem. Trusting such important issues to people was a risky gamble. People were—by definition—a loud, corruptible bunch that said one thing while secretly plotting another. Her voyages thus far had led her into the belly of the beast, had introduced her to wannabe madman Clark McCallister, had provided her with a vehicle that consequentially lay under a mountain of snow at the foot of the hill, and delivered directly into the hands of authentic madman Hannibal Lecter.

From all the philosophy she had taken, Starling was most certainly not laughing. And even if he did not betray it in his cool-as-a-cucumber tenor, she had the unnerving feeling that a certain doctor was.


*~*~*



"Are you outta your bleedin' mind?!"

Anne Summerville rolled her eyes, tossing the phone to the sofa. It was in her character to ignore anything and everything that came out of William's mouth—especially given the nature of his random complaints and not-so-insightful observations. The sound of his soap opera perturbed the otherwise idyllic mountain air.

"It shouldn't take long, all right?" she replied without looking at him. The room was filled with her companions, entangled in their own work or too compliant to care about a small change in plans. "She needs help. Honestly, you act like—"

"I jus' don't see why 's any of our concern," he retorted, huffing indignantly. "Some random bird gets 'erself into a mess, an' you leap off your sodding white horse to come an' save the day. Don' even bother to ask the rest of your friends who—"

Alyson Green looked up from her book. The kitchen area was small and expanded into the living room; the five travelers were experiencing a quiet but very obvious epidemic of cabin fever. "Will," she berated, fighting off a yawn. "Honestly, it's not like it's a huge inconvenience. Besides, you'd do the same…" She trailed off thoughtfully. "Oh wait. No, you wouldn't."

"Precisely! You can leave me outta your bloody do-gooder work."

"Ordinarily, I would agree," Anne replied, eyes narrowing. "But we were going to leave in three days anyway. It'd be pointless to have to swing all the way back here and pick you up."

A darker voice—however emasculated in shadows—offered an obvious solution. "We could always leave him."

"Yeh. You'd like that."

"All too much."

"There really is no sense in arguing." Alyson rose to her feet with a stealthy sigh, forgoing any hope of completing the chapter she had been working on for the past twenty minutes with no luck. "We're here. She's here…or not here…that being the problem and everything. Right. She's there, somewhere, and we're going to help. Case closed." A visible shudder shook her frame—head to toe. "Besides, out there, in this weather…I'd hate to turn on the news some night and hear about The Donner Party: The Sequel." Another quiver touched her every nerve, and she earned a sympathetic glance from Anne's direction. The sort that screamed moral support from every angle. "The thought just gives me the willies."

William snickered, unaffected by her discomfort. "Jus' got no stomach to you, 's all."

"Enough." That voice came from the shadows in the custom sense of stern and foreboding. The apex of an old brooder who had way too much time to spare with miniscule concerns rather than focus on the picture at large. While the man behind the statement was not one to vocally share an opinion unless otherwise inquired, it managed to portray as a minor annoyance that he could be so presumptuous. "She's in trouble. We've told her that we're coming. That's that."

That statement earned an expected eye-roll. "So bloody typical of you, Liam. 'Ohh, that bird's in a spot of trouble. Well looky there…seems to be downright impossible to get to her.'" A sardonic gleam. "Right on. Talked me into it. Let's go."

"Guys." A new judgment from one of monotonous character. Alyson's husband, Daniel, took a weary seat beside her. As newlyweds, it was some god-given law of nature that sitting next to each other rapidly transcended into a magnetic charge that brought them side-by-side. His arm stretched around her so he could play with the wisps of hair tickling the base of her throat. "It sounds like a done deal. The point of arguing about said done deal would be…?" When he received no reply, a shrug waved through his shoulders. "Doesn't really matter anyway. It was, after all, my van that was volunteered. Seems to me everyone's pretty dependent on me to get home." The last part of his resolution was said very directly to William, who scoffed indignantly at the idea of being left behind.

"You wouldn't," he growled.

"Oh, he's a wild man," Alyson offered with a grin.

"Hides it well."

Daniel shrugged once more. So much was true. The color of a thousand emotions was buried under the same tenor. It could not be helped, and was often a source of the highest entertainment when put into question. "I've been told that."

"This is just a suggestion." That was the last of the travelers. Alexander LeVille, fondly known as Alex. The not-so bickering from the back had at last drawn his attention from the television—a mistake as William seized command almost immediately, snapping the channel from whatever sports event was being viewed to tune into Passions. The fight, on his part, was hence considered abandoned. Such was the custom when something better came on the telly. "But from what I heard, that lady…what was her name?"

"Clarice Starling," Anne provided. "You remember her. She interviewed that Lecter guy a few years back. The one that escaped?"

"Hannibal the Cannibal? The cannibal? The cannibal as in, 'I get my rocks off by eating people'?"

"That's generally what cannibal means," Daniel observed. "Unless they changed the definition on me overnight. Hate it when that happens."

Another shudder from Alyson and she buried herself in the comfort of her husband's embrace. "Geez. Now I am getting yuck pictures. Why did I have to mention the Donners?"

Alex nodded, then frowned in mutual disgust. "Second that. Now I'm getting images. It's a yuck-image fest! Big old bucket of yuck. Fantastic. Why did you have to mention that?" When he caught the stern supervision he was receiving from his immediate audience, he shook his head, fought to remember what he was saying, then continued. "Anyway, beside the point. In this weather, I'm guessing anything goes. We should probably…you know…head out early. Just in case and everything. Seriously wouldn't want Miss-I-Associate-With-Cannibals to be stuck out here. Who knows—"

"Oh, I dunno," William offered, tearing his eyes from his program long enough to voice yet another inane opinion. "That'd be worth the laugh. 'F I remember right, those bloody tabloids tore her apart—right from head to toe. It'd be funny as hell to—"

"We are not leaving a person out here to die or…or something really bad just because you think it'd be funny to read about in the Enquirer or the Tattler. Okay?" Anne's voice was nearly a growl now. He had the ability to do that to her. "Alex is right. There's no use fiddling around here for three days. Let's pack it up tonight if we can."

Compliance from everyone save the lone voice of opposition served as the tying knot. The sealed deal. They would leave as soon as possible. Lord knew it would be hell to get stuck in a situation like this with the wrong person.